Rancho Tarzanadu: Helicopter Nightmare

Miss Linda had fallen asleep on her bed with the lights on and the sliding glass door open, exhausted. Her sheer lavender curtains rushed into the room in a torrid frenzy as the whir of a helicopter whipped immediately outside of her window, hovering at eye level outside her bedroom balcony. From a loudspeaker came a man's even voice: "National Security Agency! We are just observing...go about your normal business."

Miss Linda tossed and turned. She shouldn't have had that third cherry-vanilla soda with vodka. She tried to wake herself, but she was in the in-between state, in a tug-of-war with the dream world and the waking world.

There was a gust of desert winter air as the helicopter lifted itself up above the house and flew away, almost indecipherably. It was there for only seconds, long enough to realize it was there, and then it was gone into the blackness and the distant stars, slipping in between the folds of the night.

Miss Linda dreamed that she sat up straight in bed, and re-arranged her hair and smoothed out her bedclothes and blankets. Paperwork had blown all over her floor...mail and notes, and postcards and magazines and bills and post-it notes and the pages of books and seed packages and tissues and empty paper bags.

Marlon Brando came to Miss Linda in this dream, dressed in a pin-striped Zoot Suit, cigar in hand. He advised: "You must never intervene with humans and you must always entangle. Jesus, I just want to fear my own truth. Cut, and it's here...a snail. On the edge of a razor."

He took a breath.

"Believe in One Day. There was a apace. The Gardener had land and steak. Black motorcycle. The egg farmer's in the ocean. It's a day pulled. And for penguins. Ever read 'The Merchants'? It winds muscle. You're staying. Me. You will be called to the left out of justice. It's The Wonder Twins. I understand. My son, try living faster than the speed of light. But you, mad men, will still be lying and I will be sober."

He paused.

And finally: "He went as mad as a March Hare."

Miss Linda awoke, for real, disgruntled. None of it made any sense at all.

Or, obviously, the question would be: did it?